Sep 09
If you need a domain name for your business, personal business venture or you want to invest in a domain name for a future entreprenurial venture or other purpose, there are a number of items you should consider.
First, you will want to make sure your domain name is memorable and high-impact. Try to stay away with including hyphens in your domain or numbers as this decreases the value of your domain and makes it increasingly difficult for your customers to recall. Also, although domain names can be up to 256 characters in length, long domain names have like consequences and reduces the likeliness of your customers to type in the domain into their web browser if they didn’t find you on the web and could otherwise click on a link.
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Sep 09
Was recently exposed to a new sub-set of Internet marketing involving automatic content generation. A quick review of some of the tools available in this area suggests the content is generated from RSS feeds you program into the tool’s back-end/configuration area. (Disclaimer: I suggest you read into these tools a bit more — I have not personally used any of these programs as of yet.)
A few of these programs you may be interested in:
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Dec 10
Web marketers who stride with the idea that SEO is limited primarily to META tags, site architecture (i.e. properly formatted path names and file names in URLs), and writing SEO-friendly content (typically involving clever embedding of relational keywords/phrases within context) are misled. This is only half of the battle — getting your site’s pages linked elsewhere is also a critical component towards a successful SEO strategy.
To get started, FeedBurner (www.feedburner.com) is an excellent tool that allows web marketers to easily track how many people are subscribed to their RSS feed(s) while offering a historical analysis of your feed’s popularity and a breakdown of your feed’s most popular content (such as the top 5 headlines your visitors clicked on, etc.) What you want to do is create a Feedburner account if you don’t already have one and burn feed links through their web site that link to your feed’s XML file stored on your server.
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Dec 08
If you want a more automated approach towards your web site advertising initiative, there are a number of web advertising networks to choose from. For many, Google’s popular AdSense program works but it does not necessarily produce the most relevant ads due to the way it works (contextual advertising based). For those that want to veer away from contextual advertising options such as AdSense, Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT or Kontera’s ContentLink service, 3 alternatives exist that may actually suit your needs better. These options involve for formal advertising networks serving ads specific to one’s target audience/niche.
To learn more about these options, you should visit the following 3 web sites and decide which one may be best suited for your needs. Adify and AdBrite are designed more for consumer oriented web sites while Adroll offers more specific targeting for B2B companies in addition to B2C.
Aug 14
I will have to say I am very disappointed with Kontera and believe they are a SCAM.
I tried their service and accumulated approximately $20-25. Unfortunately the keywords highlighted in context with our site’s content was not practical for our audience and started to impact our credibility. As a result, we were forced to cancel our account.
I must have sent 2-3 e-mails, complete with our account number, user ID, password, etc. inquiring about when we would receive a payment as no payment arrived after approximately 3 months canceling our account. All requests were ignored.
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Aug 02
Top strategies that may contributes towards increased web revenue include:
- Listing your items on product comparison web sites and carefully monitoring success via click-throughs, etc. and optimizing the feeds as necessary.
- Listing your items for sale on eBay, via an eBay storefront.
- Creating 2 storefronts, each acting as if they are separate with varying SEO/marketing strategy tactics used (this helps to determine what’s the best e-commerce strategy to use).
- Applying to be a supplier with Internet-based wholesalers such as Doba.com and Shopster.com.
- Sell your products on Amazon.com (create a merchant account).
- In terms of getting your products to brick and mortar retail stores, you may want to consider supplying to traditional wholesalers (not Internet based) and start negotiation channels with those responsible for purchasing new items ( i.e. I believe Wal-Mart does all their purchasing and selection from their home office).
- This one would take some time to develop but may be worth the investment… you can offer customer support, order fulfillment/distribution, returns, etc. to entrepreneurs who want to sell your products by creating portals displaying your products they can arrange and mark up under the vise of their own store logo/branding, etc. ‘in partnership’ with company X (if you don’t want to use your current company name as the trademark).
Apr 20
First, as a caveat (and despite all the hype of CMS’s), unless you are a major corporation with thousands of employees requiring the ability to create/maintain web content on-the-fly, the benefits of implementing a static or semi-dynamic web site may outweigh the advantages of a bona-fide Content Management System.
You should ask yourself whether or not you require a site-wide CMS. Publishers for instance may only need a news/article publishing system vs. having the ability to maintain their entire web content collection via the web. Such systems mimic the capability of popular blog systems such as Wordpress (www.wordpress.org) and Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) — both very powerful programs.
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Apr 15
Not to be confused with Google AdWords, the Internet giant’s service placing ads on Google.com search pages, AdSense (when properly configured) automatically places relevant AdWords advertisements on web pages. The service is open to everyone and Google pays you every time someone clicks on one of their ads on your web site. (Be careful however of testing/clicking on one of these ads placed on your web site as that is considered click-fraud and Google has been known to crack down on these cases, suspending and/or terminating AdSense accounts and voiding any revenue generated from qualified clicks.) In case you may not already be aware, AdSense is a pay-per-click program falling under the contextual advertising area.
I personally have heard of one case where a publisher has made as much as $60,000+/year on AdSense revenue and one even shared at an industry conference his company pulls in $300,000/year on qualified AdSense click-throughs. Although these accounts are unverified, I do not see how this would not be possible per personal experience integrating AdSense on various web sites and watching this revenue grow over time. Bloggers for instance are notorious for using AdSense as their primary source of income, allowing many to function as independent, full time/professional bloggers. Google has published a few interesting case studies on this topic, which may be viewed at https://www.google.com/adsense/success. You may also be interested in reviewing Google’s official AdSense Blog. If your site (or sites) pull more than ~50,000 pageviews per month, you may be surprised to see how well this program can perform.
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Apr 11
Functioning similarly to Google’s popular AdSense ad serving program, Kontera’s ContentLink system places ads within the context of your web pages by automatically linking keywords/phrases to various advertisements.
For example, you may view an article and see a double-underlined phrase and when you point your mouse over the link, a ‘bubble’ appears (such as the conversational bubbles you see in newspaper comic strips) displaying an ad relevant to that specific phrase. These ads appear in a variety of different formats, embedding text and/or static graphic ads or even dynamic flash video ads. Interestingly enough, ContentLink ads bypass built-in pop-up blockers in at least Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox so implementing this could prove to be a valuable enhancement to your web site, if practical.
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Jan 09
How Everyday People can Become Successful Entrepreneurs Online
A common misconception with new online entrepreneurs is that one can no longer become wealthy pursuing web ventures today. Many believe the more desirable opportunities have already materialized and thus all playing fields realized, which to some extent is true but opportunity does, and always will knock. It could be said, regarding traditional inventions that most everything (at least at the most basic, primitive level) has been invented and that new inventions are essentially improvements/enhancements of existing inventions or share common characteristics of previously new product deployments on the market (i.e. a 3-in-one scanner/copier/printer machine, a fiberglass hull for a sailing vessel, etc.) Likewise, on the web, individuals seeking desirable income through this medium must research opportunities in-depth, particularly seeking niche markets with good potential for development while at the same time posing as a true interest of their own (passion is key towards developing a successful Internet venture.)
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